AP article, Brooklyn Museum exhibit
Luk
NYC Museum Debates Pulling Painting By Beth Gardiner
Tuesday, Sept. 28, 1999; 12:38 p.m. EDT
___________________________________________
"It depicts Mary with dark skin, African features and flowing robes and
includes a shellacked clump of elephant dung, suggesting a breast, and
dozens of pictures of female private parts apparently cut out of
pornographic images."
Other works in the exhibit include a series of mannequins with sex
organs in place of noses and mouths; two halves of a pig, sliced from
snout to hoof, suspended in two formaldehyde tanks.
Hess said Rubin offered a package of proposals. They included removing
the painting, having the museum forgo 20 percent of its city funding
while the exhibit is open; and segregating half-dozen other
objectionable works from the rest of the show.
"Whatever I discussed is now off the table," Rubin said. Museum director
Arnold Lehman said he remained opposed to removing any work from the
exhibit. Any agreement would have to be approved by the museum board.
"A number of possible resolutions were looked at, but there was and is
no agreement of any kind," a museum statement said. "The museum is
planning to open 'Sensation' on Saturday as scheduled and as planned."
Ofili is noted for using elephant dung in his works and has been dubbed
the Elephant Man by some London art critics.
Ofili, born in England to Nigerian parents, said he is a churchgoing
Catholic and former altar boy. He said the elephant dung is a cultural
reference to his African heritage.
_______________________________________AP
Luk
Every9man wrote:
> Could you either post the entire article and not just an excerpt Luk, or could
> you provide the url?
> I notice that Lord Sir appears to be correct when he assumed that the elephant
> dung might have a cultural reference.
The full article is posted below.
That comment was, in fact, made by the artist.
However it has been pointed out that the artist is
from the UK, not Africa, that he calls it "shit"
and that he has visited Africa only briefly. In
other words, there was no legitimate philosophical
reason for the use of elephant dung. He was
simply trying to cause a stir, as is his habit.
Luk
__________________________________________________________
"It depicts Mary with dark skin, African features and flowing robes and
includes a shellacked clump of elephant dung, suggesting a breast, and
dozens of pictures of female private parts apparently cut out of
pornographic images."
NYC Museum Debates Pulling Painting
By Beth Gardiner
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, Sept. 28, 1999; 12:38 p.m. EDT
NEW YORK –– A Brooklyn Museum of Art official proposed removing a
portrait of the Virgin Mary that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani deemed
offensive, but then backed away from the offer after other museum
officials balked, the mayor said today.
Removing the portrait "was being discussed. Apparently members of the
board got real upset about that," Giuliani said at a morning news
conference announcing that a purported deal had fallen through.
The battle over the painting "The Holy Virgin Mary" by Chris Ofili has
been raging for several days and even drew in first lady Hillary Rodham
Clinton. Giuliani has threatened to pull $7 million in city funds from
the Brooklyn Museum, where the painting is scheduled to be exhibited
starting Saturday as part of a show on young British artists.
It depicts Mary with dark skin, African features and flowing robes and
includes a shellacked clump of elephant dung, suggesting a breast, and
dozens of pictures of female private parts apparently cut out of
pornographic images.
Corporation Counsel Michael Hess, the city's top lawyer, met with Robert
Rubin, chairman of the museum's board of directors, on Monday.
Hess said Rubin offered a package of proposals. They included removing
the painting, having the museum forgo 20 percent of its city funding
while the exhibit is open; and segregating half-dozen other
objectionable works from the rest of the show.
"I think one person thought this could be done and then when the arts
professionals got involved in it they got very offended by the whole
thing," the mayor said today, referring to Rubin.
Rubin told The New York Times he was not offering the three steps as a
package, but had mentioned them as separate possibilities.
"Whatever I discussed is now off the table," Rubin said. Museum director
Arnold Lehman said he remained opposed to removing any work from the
exhibit. Any agreement would have to be approved by the museum board.
"A number of possible resolutions were looked at, but there was and is
no agreement of any kind," a museum statement said. "The museum is
planning to open 'Sensation' on Saturday as scheduled and as planned."
"Sensation" has also become the latest issue in the duel between
Giuliani and Mrs. Clinton, both all-but-declared candidates for the
Senate from New York. Mrs. Clinton said Monday that she the museum
shouldn't lose its city funds – money that makes up a third of its
budget.
At the same time, she said, she shares "the feeling that I know many New
Yorkers have that there are parts of this exhibit that would be deeply
offensive. I would not go to see this exhibit."
Giuliani, who is Roman Catholic, accused the first lady of supporting
the use of public money to attack Catholicism. But critics say
Giuliani's attacks threaten artistic freedom.
Ofili is noted for using elephant dung in his works and has been dubbed
the Elephant Man by some London art critics.
"I don't feel as though I have to defend it," Ofili, 31, said of the
painting in a Times interview. "The people who are attacking this
painting are attacking their own interpretation, not mine."
Ofili, born in England to Nigerian parents, said he is a churchgoing
Catholic and former altar boy. He said the elephant dung is a cultural
reference to his African heritage.
Cardinal John O'Connor said he was saddened by what appears to be an
attack on the Virgin Mary. And Gov. George Pataki said he was grateful
that no state money was involved in the exhibit.
Other works in the exhibit include a series of mannequins with sex
organs in place of noses and mouths; two halves of a pig, sliced from
snout to hoof, suspended in two formaldehyde tanks.
© Copyright 1999 The Associated Press
___________________________________________AP
Luk
> I notice that Lord Sir appears to be correct when he
> assumed that the elephant dung might have a cultural reference.
Barbara:
I posted the full AP article you requested.
But the information you want is more fully explained
in the following article, which was posted by Desilets.
Luk
"Modern art is a load of bullshit"
-----------------WHY CAN'T THE ART WORLD ACCEPT SOCIAL
-------------------SATIRE FROM A BLACK ARTIST?
BY BENJAMIN IVRY
British artist Chris Ofili hardly looks the type to foment revolutions: A
handsome, diminutive man, the 30-year-old looks African, but he was born in
Manchester and has spent his entire art career in England -- except for six
weeks in Africa, where he got the idea to use elephant dung as a substance
in his art, for its sculptural qualities and metaphorical resonance. Not
straight out of the elephant, mind you, but chemically treated to avoid
putrefaction, odor and flies -- unlike the gruesome work of his colleague,
British artist Damien Hirst, whose cross-sectioned cows and other rotting
animalia have offended gallery goers for some time now. In contrast to
Hirst's putrefyingly sinister work and aggressively grubby persona, Ofili is
self-confident and good-humored, given to disarming asides in interviews,
such as his declaration about his sculpture "Elephantastic," which displays
a sculpted cock and hairy balls: "My balls are hairy."
Yet when Ofili recently won 20,000 pounds sterling as part of the Tate
Gallery's noted Turner Prize, reaction was ill-humored indeed: The Web site
ArtNet snobbily commented that Ofili is "known for garishly colored,
ethnic-naive paintings with chunks of elephant dung attached to their
surfaces." The assessment echoed a Brit tabloid's headline about a previous
show at the Royal Academy featuring Ofili's work: "Foul Porn Invades Brit
Art Gallery." An enraged British military draughtsman dumped a wheelbarrow
of cow manure on the sidewalk in front of the exhibit, to prove that "modern
art is a load of bullshit." It's a sentiment with which Ofili himself might
agree.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that what has offended some people about
Ofili is not just the elephant dung, but the combination of a black artist
and dung. The military draughtsman admitted that while he was no fan of
Hirst's dead animals, Ofili's dung was "the final straw." Yet Ofili is, in
addition to being an imaginative artist, also a humorist and social critic
of the art scene. He placed boxed ads in the tony Brit art magazine Frieze
that read, simply, "Elephant Shit," amid ads announcing other art shows. He
used lumps of dung to prop up some of his paintings. "Somehow it makes the
painting feel more relaxed, instead of being pinned upon the wall like it's
being crucified ... [The painting can] stand in its own shit and watch the
other paintings being crucified on the wall." He has placed dung in a paper
bag for his installment "Bag of Shit," and in 1993, held a Shit Sale in
Brick Lane Market in London. He has played with the street parlance of
"shit" as drugs, and the fact that some people have assumed he was selling
drugs because of his dreadlocked hairstyle -- hence his work "Shithead": a
piece of elephant dung, which resembles hashish, incorporating his own hair.
Ofili is all too aware of ethnic categorizing in the art world, which
expects a black artist to be naive, tribal or shamanistic, and so declares
about his six weeks in Zimbabwe: "It's [a] great country, but it's a foreign
country for me and the idea of looking for your roots and stuff is
ridiculous." He sees his success of the moment as having a token aspect, due
to the fact that "maybe there aren't many good artists that coincidentally
happen to be within the mainstream category of a British artist: white,
heterosexual, more often than not, men." Ofili's art, despite its serious
treatment of problems of culture and "sexual stereotyping," as the Turner
Award citation points out, is also often amusing. The Turner Prize, despite
its traditional-sounding name, has only existed since 1984 and was judged
this year by a hardly academic small group that included Pet Shop Boy Neil
Tennant and offbeat author Marina Warner.
Still, one of the last taboos for black artists is that of laughter: We are
accustomed to somber, portentous and grandiose personalities like Nobel
Prize-winner Toni Morrison. But what can prepare a gallery-goer for Ofili's
works, which carefully offer a scroll with the name of the elephants from
British zoos who donated the material -- Liang-Liang from London Zoo, Geetza
or Eza, the latter two, Ofili explains, being "the same elephant, in fact,
but it's got two names." With the celebratory gusto of Laurent de Brunhoff's
Babar the elephant books, or F. Poulenc's orchestral suite they inspired,
Ofili follows the elephants, not just for joy but for decorative power. He
points out: "I'm interested in ideas of beauty ... and elephant dung in
itself is quite a beautiful object. But a different sort of beauty. And I
want to bring the kind of beauty and decorativeness of the paintings
together with the apparent concept of ugliness of the shit and put them
together and try and make them exist."
But if some Brits seem unhappy with the idea of a droll black artist, the
American art scene can be even more humorless. A recent Whitney Museum
retrospective of gifted African-American artist Bob Thompson (1937-1966), an
inspired combination of Nicolas Poussin, Emil Nolde and James Thurber,
produced an admirable catalog published by the Whitney and the University of
California Press. However, critics focused mainly on Thompson's death by
drug overdose in his 20s, comparing him to Jean-Michel Basquiat, with whom
he had nothing in common apart from being black. Thompson's art was given a
murky, ill-focused cataloging by an unknown and unidentified Africanist
scholar named Shamim Momin. But it cries out for analysis by someone as
astutely entrenched in the Western art tradition as he himself was.
What brings creators like Thompson and Ofili together is more than their
insistence on individuality, and the humor and beauty of their work; it's
that they both refuse to be pigeonholed in any way. The brouhaha following
Ofili's prize shows that his social satire is needed more than ever in the
art world today. Not that he was humbled at all by the violent reaction --
as he climbed the rostrum to accept his Turner Prize, he reportedly
deadpanned: "Thank God. Where's my check?"
SALON | Feb. 10, 1999
Every9man
you provide the url?
dung might have a cultural reference.
Barbara
Subject: AP article, Brooklyn Museum exhibit
From: Luk <lukn...@mindspring.com>
Date: Tue, 28 September 1999 08:25 PM EDT
Message-id: <37F15C7D...@mindspring.com>
Excerpts:
NYC Museum Debates Pulling Painting By Beth Gardiner
Tuesday, Sept. 28, 1999; 12:38 p.m. EDT
___________________________________________
"It depicts Mary with dark skin, African features and flowing robes and
includes a shellacked clump of elephant dung, suggesting a breast, and
dozens of pictures of female private parts apparently cut out of
pornographic images."
Other works in the exhibit include a series of mannequins with sex
organs in place of noses and mouths; two halves of a pig, sliced from
snout to hoof, suspended in two formaldehyde tanks.
Hess said Rubin offered a package of proposals. They included removing
the painting, having the museum forgo 20 percent of its city funding
while the exhibit is open; and segregating half-dozen other
objectionable works from the rest of the show.
"Whatever I discussed is now off the table," Rubin said. Museum director
Arnold Lehman said he remained opposed to removing any work from the
exhibit. Any agreement would have to be approved by the museum board.
"A number of possible resolutions were looked at, but there was and is
no agreement of any kind," a museum statement said. "The museum is
planning to open 'Sensation' on Saturday as scheduled and as planned."
Ofili is noted for using elephant dung in his works and has been dubbed
the Elephant Man by some London art critics.
Ofili, born in England to Nigerian parents, said he is a churchgoing
Catholic and former altar boy. He said the elephant dung is a cultural
reference to his African heritage.
_______________________________________AP
t...@grovereference.com
Dictionary of Art Online at www.groveart.com. You can register for a
free trial and read the article on Ofili (as well as many others) from
your web browser. For your convenience, the article is also copied in
at the end of this message.
But this furor over art is hardly a new development. In the Dictionary,
you can also read about other artists who were similarly attacked. The
early work of Henri Matisse incited art critic Louis Vauxcelles to
adopt the term "fauve" to describe Matisse’s "savage" use of color. And
let’s remember John Singer Sargent, recently the subject of an
extremely popular exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. This
celebrated portraitist was pilloried by the French public in 1884 for
his "sexually brazen" painting of 'Madame X' with that dress strap
hanging off her shoulder.
And a bit further back in history, David Jorisz, an early Netherlandish
stained glass designer was arrested for blasphemy in 1528. He was
fined, whipped and had a hole bored through his tongue! English
Architect Charles Lamb’s churches were singled out for particularly
vitriolic criticism, and even Michelangelo had his nose broken by an
envious colleague, Pietro Torrigiani.
Since the online version of the Dictionary of Art is updated regularly,
you can find information on newly emerging artists alongside those
already well established, like art world bad boy Damien Hirst, and
Rachel Whiteread, a Turner Prize winner only a few years before Ofili.
For more information on The Grove Dictionary of Art Online, please go
to
Therese Ng
Grove's Dictionaries
-----
Following is the article on Chris Ofili:
Ofili, Chris
(b Manchester, 10 Oct 1968). English painter. He studied at Chelsea
School of Art (1988-91) and the Royal College of Art (1991-3). In 1992
he was awarded a travelling scholarship to Zimbabwe, an experience that
profoundly influenced his approach to painting. His works are vibrant,
technically complex and meticulously executed, consisting of layers of
paint, resin, glitter and collage. Reflecting his innnovatory technique
and inspired by his Africa trip, Ofili often incorporates elephant dung
into his work. Lumps are attached to the canvas directly or used to
support works in the gallery space. His paintings are concerned with
issues of black identity and
experience and frequently employ racial stereotypes in order to
challenge them. Thus in Afrodizzia (second version) (1996), the work
has reference to the stereotype of black sexual potency, and magazine
cut-out faces are given 1970s Afro hairstyles, their names written in
pinheads on lumps of dung. In exploring such themes, Ofili draws on a
wide range of cultural references, from the Bible to jazz and hip hop
music, from Blake and Rodin to pornographic magazines. This breadth of
allusion is emphatic in the Captain Shit series which features a black
superhero inspired by 1970s comic books, surrounded by a band of black
stars. The humorous aspect of the depiction of an ostensibly powerful
but also vulnerable superhero is recurrent in Ofili’s
work. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1998.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
S. Morgan: ‘The Elephant Man: Stuart Morgan on Chris Ofili’, Frieze, xv
(1994), pp.40-3
Chris Ofili (exh. cat. by G. Worsdale and L. G. Corrin, Southampton,
C.A.G. and London, Serpentine Gal., 1998)
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